The latest exhibition at the British Museum looks set to bring Ice Age Art out of cold storage. Dubbed as an exhibition that’s 40,000 years in the making, it will feature artifacts that were made in the last ice age, including some of the world’s oldest know etchings and sculptures.
The Ice Age Art exhibition shows the introduction of the modern human mind on earth and some of their first attempts of artistic flare. Each of the artifacts on display were made between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, making them pretty damn old, but more than anything, they show a very modern artistic flare considering when they were made.
Objects on display include the tip of a mammoth tusk carved as two reindeer one behind the other (approx. 13,000 years old from Montastruc, France), a modelled figure of a round bodied mature woman from Dolni Vestonice, which is the oldest ceramic figure in the world and a fragment of a decorated reindeer metatarsal bone engraved with two reindeer from Madeleine, France.
The exhibition starts at the British Museum on the 7th February 2013 and it’s scheduled to run until the 26th May 2013. Tickets are £10 for adults; £8 for students, 16-18 year-olds, disabled visitors and unemployed, plus it’s free for museum members and under 16s. Opening times are 10am to 5.30pm daily with late opening to 8.30pm on Fridays.
If you want to take your interest in Ice Age Art to the next level, you can also try one of the events that have been scheduled to accompany the exhibition. The most interesting of these is The Shock of the Old: Art in the Ice Age between 6.30pm and 8pm on Friday 1st March 2013. It discusses how the artifacts in the exhibition can be evaluated as works of art and features Charlotte Higgins, Chief Arts writer for The Guardian, who asks exhibition curator Jill Cook, artist Grayson Perry and contemporary sculpture curator Stephen Feeke to discuss the nameless anonymity of the creators of the artifacts as well as the ‘artistic instinct’ that the works exude.
